But when he at last turned his little tough team toward Frenchman’s Bend again, Bookwright and Tull had long since returned home and told it. It was now September. The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless—a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. The feet of the small horses twinkled rapidly in the dust and he sat, loose and easy to the motion, the reins loose in one hand, inscrutable of face, his eyes darkly impenetrable, quizzical and bemused, remembering, still seeing them—the bank, the courthouse, the station; the calm beautiful mask seen once more beyond a moving pane of glass, then gone. But that was all right, it was just meat, just gal-meat he thought, and God knows there was a plenty of that, yesterday and tomorrow too. Of course there was the waste, not wasted on Snopes but on all of them, himself included—Except was it waste? he thought suddenly, seeing the face again for an instant as though he had recalled not only the afternoon but the train too—the train itself, which had served its day and schedule and so, despite the hard cars, the locomotive, no more existed. He looked at the face again. It had not been tragic, and now it was not even damned, since from behind it there looked out only another mortal natural enemy of the masculine race. And beautiful: but then, so did the highwayman’s daggers and pistols make a pretty shine on him; and now as he watched, the lost calm face vanished. It went fast; it was as if the moving glass were in retrograde, it too merely a part, a figment, of the concentric flotsam and jetsam of the translation, and there remained only the straw bag, the minute tie, the constant jaw:
Until at last, baffled, they come to the Prince hisself. ‘Sire,’ they says. ‘He just wont. We cant do nothing with him.’
‘What?’ the Prince hollers.
‘He says a bargain is a bargain. That he swapped in good faith and honor, and now he has come to redeem it, like the law says. And we cant find it,’ they says. ‘We done looked everywhere. It wasn’t no big one to begin with nohow, and we was specially careful in handling it. We sealed it up in a asbestos matchbox and put the box in a separate compartment to itself. But when we opened the compartment, it was gone. The matchbox was there and the seal wasn’t broke. But there wasn’t nothing in the matchbox but a little kind of dried-up smear under one edge. And now he has come to redeem it. But how can we redeem him into eternal torment without his soul?’
‘Damn it,’ the Prince hollers. ‘Give him one of the extra ones. Aint there souls turning up here every day, banging at the door and raising all kinds of hell to get in here, even bringing letters from Congressmen, that we never even heard of? Give him one of them.’
‘We tried that,’ they says. He wont do it. He says he dont want no more and no less than his legal interest according to what the banking and the civil laws states in black and white is hisn. He says he has come prepared to meet his bargain and signature, and he sholy expects you of all folks to meet yourn.’
‘Tell him he can go then. Tell him he had the wrong address. That there aint nothing on the books here against him. Tell him his note was lost—if there ever was one. Tell him we had a flood, even a freeze.’
‘He wont go, not without his——’
‘Turn him out. Eject him.’
‘How?’ they says. ‘He’s got the law.’
‘Oho,’ the Prince says. ‘A sawmill advocate. I see. All right,’ he says. ‘Fix it. Why bother me?’ And he set back and raised his glass and blowed the flames offen it like he thought they was already gone. Except they wasn’t gone.
‘Fix what?’ they says.
‘His bribe!’ the Prince hollers. ‘His bribe! Didn’t you just tell me he come in here with his mouth full of law? Did you expect him to hand you a wrote-out bill for it?’
‘We tried that,’ they says. ‘He wont bribe.’
Then the Prince set up there and sneered at them, with his sharp bitter tongue and no talkback, about how likely what they thought was a bribe would be a cash discount with maybe a trip to the Legislature throwed in, and them standing there and listening and taking it because he was the Prince. Only there was one of them that had been there in the time of the Prince’s pa. He used to dandle the Prince on his knee when the Prince was a boy; he even made the Prince a little pitchfork and learned him how to use it practising on Chinees and Dagoes and Polynesians, until his arms would get strong enough to handle his share of white folks. He didn’t appreciate this and he drawed hisself up and he looked at the Prince and he says,
‘Your father made, unreproved, a greater failure. Though maybe a greater man tempted a greater man.’
‘Or you have been reproved by a lesser,’ the Prince snaps back. But he remembered them old days too, when the old fellow was smiling fond and proud on his crude youthful inventions with BB size lava and brimstone and such, and bragging to the old Prince at night about how the boy done that day, about what he invented to do to that little Dago or Chinee that even the grown folks hadn’t thought of yet. So he apologised and got the old fellow smoothed down, and says, ‘What did you offer him?’
‘The gratifications.’
‘And——?’
‘He has them. He says that for a man that only chews, any spittoon will do:
‘And then?’
‘The vanities.’
‘And——?’
‘He has them. He brought a gross with him in the suitcase, specially made up for him outen asbestos, with unmeltable snaps.’
‘Then what does he want?’ the Prince hollers. ‘What does he want? Paradise?’ And the old one looks at him and at first the Prince thinks it’s because he aint forgot that sneer. But he finds out different.
‘No,’ the old one says. ‘He wants hell.’
And now for a while there aint a sound in that magnificent kingly hall hung about with the proud battle-torn smokes of the old martyrs but the sound of frying and the faint constant screams of authentic Christians. But the Prince was the same stock and blood his pa was. In a flash the sybaritic indolence and the sneers was gone; it might have been the old Prince hisself that stood there. ‘Bring him to me,’ he says. ‘Then leave us.’
So they brought him in and went away and closed the door. His clothes was still smoking a little, though soon he had done brushed most of it off. He come up to the Throne, chewing, toting the straw suitcase.
‘Well?’ the Prince says.
He turned his head and spit, the spit flying off the floor quick in a little blue ball of smoke. ‘I come about that soul,’ he says.
‘So they tell me,’ the Prince says. ‘But you have no soul.’
‘Is that my fault?’ he says.
‘Is it mine?’ the Prince says. ‘Do you think I created you?’
‘Then who did?’ he says. And he had the Prince there and the Prince knowed it. So the Prince set out to bribe him hisself. He named over all the temptations, the gratifications, the satieties; it sounded sweeter than music the way the Prince fetched them up in detail. But he didnt even stop chewing, standing there holding the straw suitcase. Then the Prince said, ‘Look yonder, ‘pointing at the wall, and there they was, in order and rite for him to watch, watching hisself performing them all, even the ones he hadn’t even thought about inventing to hisself yet, until they was done, the last unimaginable one. And he just turned his head and spit another scorch of tobacco onto the floor and the Prince flung back on the Throne in very exasperation and baffled rage.
‘Then what do you want?’ the Prince says. ‘What do you want? Paradise?’
‘I hadn’t figured on it,’ he says. ‘Is it yours to offer?’
‘Then whose is it?’ the Prince says. And the Prince knowed he had him there. In fact, the Prince knowed he had him all the time, ever since they had told him how he had walked in the door with his mouth a
lready full of law; he even leaned over and rung the fire-bell so the old one could be there to see and hear how it was done, then he leaned back on the Throne and looked down at him standing there with his straw suitcase, and says, ‘You have admitted and even argued that I created you. Therefore your soul was mine all the time. And therefore when you offered it as security for this note, you offered that which you did not possess and so laid yourself liable to——
‘I have never disputed that,’ he says.
‘—criminal action. So take your bag and—’ the Prince says. ‘Eh?’ the Prince says. ‘What did you say?’
‘I have never disputed that,’ he says.
‘What?’ the Prince says. ‘Disputed what?’ Except that it dont make any noise, and now the Prince is leaning forward, and now he feels that ere hot floor under his knees and he can feel hisself grabbing and hauling at his throat to get the words out like he was digging potatoes outen hard ground. ‘Who are you?’ he says, choking and gasping and his eyes a-popping up at him setting there with that straw suitcase on the Throne among the bright, crown-shaped flames. ‘Take Paradise!’ the Prince screams. ‘Take it! Take it!’ And the wind roars up and the dark roars down and the Prince scrabbling across the floor, clawing and scrabbling at that locked door, screaming…
BOOK THREE
THE LONG SUMMER
CHAPTER ONE
1
Sitting in the halted buckboard, Ratliff watched the old fat white horse emerge from Varner’s lot and come down the lane beside the picket fence, surrounded and preceded by the rich sonorous organ-tone of its entrails. So he’s back to the horse again, he thought. He’s got to straddle his legs at least once to keep on moving. So he had to pay that too. Not only the deed to the land and the two-dollar wedding license and them two tickets to Texas and the cash, but the riding in that new buggy with somebody to do the driving, to get that patented necktie out of his store and out of his house. The horse came up and stopped, apparently of its own accord, beside the buckboard in which Ratliff sat neat, decorous, and grave like a caller in a house of death.
“You must have been desperate,” he said quietly. He meant no insult. He was not even thinking of Varner’s daughter’s shame or of his daughter at all. He meant the land, the Old Frenchman place. He had never for one moment believed that it had no value. He might have believed this if anyone else had owned it. But the very fact that Varner had ever come into possession of it and still kept it, apparently making no effort to sell it or do anything else with it, was proof enough for him. He declined to believe that Varner ever had been or ever would be stuck with anything; that if he acquired it, he got it cheaper than anyone else could have, and if he kept it, it was too valuable to sell. In the case of the Old Frenchman place he could not see why this was so, but the fact that Varner had bought it and still had it was sufficient. So when Varner finally did let it go, Ratliff believed it was because Varner had at last got the price for which he had been holding it for twenty years, or at least some sufficient price, whether it was in money or not. And when he considered who Varner had relinquished possession to, he believed that the price had been necessity and not cash.
Varner knew that Ratliff was thinking it. He sat the old horse and looked down at Ratliff, the little hard eyes beneath their bushy rust-colored brows glinting at the man who was a good deal nearer his son in spirit and intellect and physical appearance too than any of his own get. “So you think pure liver aint going to choke that cat,” he said.
“Maybe with that ere little piece of knotted-up string in it?” Ratliff said.
“What little piece of knotted-up string?”
“I dont know,” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “You going my way?”
“I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “I’m going to mosey down to the store.” Unless maybe he even feels he can set around it too again now, he thought.
“So am I,” Varner said. “I got that damn trial this morning. That damn Jack Houston and that What’s-his-name. Mink. About that durned confounded scrub yearling.”
“You mean Houston sued him?” Ratliff said. “Houston?”
“No no. Houston just kept the yearling up. He kept it up all last summer and Snopes let him pasture and feed it all winter, and it run in Houston’s pasture all this spring and summer too. Then last week for some reason he decided to go and get it. I reckon he figured to beef it. So he went to Houston’s with a rope. He was in Houston’s pasture, trying to catch it, when Houston come up and stopped him. He finally had to draw his pistol, he claims. He says Snopes looked at the pistol and said, ‘That’s what you’ll need. Because you know I aint got one.’ And Houston said all right, they would lay the pistol on a fence post and back off one post apiece on each side and count three and run for it.”
“Why didn’t they?” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said shortly. “Come on. I want to get it over with. I got some business to tend to.”
“You go on,” Ratliff said. “I’ll mosey on slow. I aint got no yearling calf nor trial neither today.”
So the old fat clean horse (it looked always as if it had just come back from the dry-cleaner’s; you could almost smell the benzine) moved on again, with a rich preliminary internal chord, going on along the gapped and weathered picket fence. Ratliff sat in the still-motionless buckboard and watched it and the lean, loose-jointed figure which, with the exception of the three-year runabout interval, had bestridden it, the same saddle between them, for twenty-five years, thinking how if, as dogs do, the white horse or his own two either had snuffed along that fence for yellow-wheeled buggies now, they would not have found them, thinking: And all the other two-legged feice in this country between thirteen and eighty can pass here now without feeling no urge to stop and raise one of them against it. And yet those buggies were still there. He could see them, sense them. Something was; it was too much to have vanished that quickly and completely—the air polluted and rich and fine which had flowed over and shaped that abundance and munificence, which had done the hydraulic office to that almost unbroken progression of chewed food, which had held intact the constant impact of those sixteen years of sitting down: so why should not that body at the last have been the unscalable sierra, the rosy virginal mother of barricades for no man to conquer scot-free or even to conquer at all, but on the contrary to be hurled back and down, leaving no scar, no mark of himself (That ere child aint going to look no more like nobody this country ever saw than she did, he thought.)—the buggy merely a part of the whole, a minor and trivial adjunct, like the buttons on her clothing, the clothes themselves, the cheap beads which one of the three of them had given her. That would never have been for him, not even at the prime summer peak of what he and Varner both would have called his tomcatting’s heyday. He knew that without regret or grief, he would not have wanted it to be (It would have been like giving me a pipe organ, that never had and never would know any more than how to wind up the secondhand music box I had just swapped a mailbox for, he thought.) and he even thought of the cold and froglike victor without jealousy: and this not because he knew that, regardless of whatever Snopes had expected or would have called what it was he now had, it would not be victory. What he felt was outrage at the waste, the useless squandering; at a situation intrinsically and inherently wrong by any economy, like building a log dead-fall and baiting it with a freshened heifer to catch a rat; or no, worse: as though the gods themselves had funnelled all the concentrated bright wet-slanted unparadised June onto a dung-heap, breeding pismires. Beyond the white horse, beyond the corner of the picket fence, the faint, almost overgrown lane turned off which led to the Old Frenchman place. The horse attempted to turn into it until Varner hauled it roughly back. Not to mention the poorhouse, Ratliff thought. But then, he wouldn’t have been infested. He shook his own reins slightly. “Boys,” he said, “advance.”
The team, the buckboard, went on in the thick dust of the spent summer. Now he could see the village proper�
��the store, the blacksmith shop, the metal roof of the gin with a thin rapid shimmer of exhaust above the stack. It was now the third week in September; the dry, dust-laden air vibrated steadily to the rapid beat of the engine, though so close were the steam and the air in temperature that no exhaust was visible but merely a thin feverish shimmer of mirage. The very hot, vivid air, which seemed to be filled with the slow laborious plaint of laden wagons, smelled of lint; wisps of it clung among the dust-stiffened roadside weeds and small gouts of cotton lay imprinted by hoof-and wheel-marks into the trodden dust. He could see the wagons too, the long motionless line of them behind the patient, droop-headed mules, waiting to advance a wagon-length at a time, onto the scales and then beneath the suction pipe where Jody Varner would now be again, what with a second new clerk in the store—the new clerk exactly like the old one but a little smaller, a little compacter, as if they had both been cut with the same die but in inverse order to appearance, the last first and after the edges of the die were dulled and spread a little—with his little, full, bright-pink mouth like a kitten’s button and his bright, quick, amoral eyes like a chipmunk and his air of merry and incorrigible and unflagging conviction of the inherent constant active dishonesty of all men, including himself.
Jody Varner was at the scales; Ratliff craned his turkey’s neck in passing and saw the heavy bagging broadcloth, the white collarless shirt with a yellow halfmoon of sweat at each armpit, the dusty, lint-wisped black hat. So I reckon maybe everybody is satisfied now, he thought. Or everybody except one, he added to himself because before he reached the store Will Varner came out of it and got onto the white horse which someone had just untied and held for him, and on the gallery beyond Ratliff now saw the eruption of men whose laden wagons stood along the road opposite, waiting for the scales, and as he drove up to the gallery in his turn, Mink Snopes and the other Snopes, the proverbist, the schoolteacher (he now wore a new frock coat which, for all its newness, looked no less like it belonged to him than the old one in which Ratliff had first seen him did) came down the steps. Ratliff saw the intractable face now cold and still with fury behind the single eyebrow; beside it the rodent’s face of the teacher, the two of them seeming to pass him in a whirling of flung uncoordinated hands and arms out of the new, black, swirling frock coat, the voice that, also like the gestures, seemed to be not servant but master of the body which supplied blood and wind to them: “Be patient; Caesar never built Rome in one day; patience is the horse that runs steadiest; justice is the right man’s bread but poison for the evil man if you give it time. I done looked the law up; Will Varner has misread it pure and simple. We’ll take a appeal. We will—” until the other turned his furious face with its single violent emphasis of eyebrow upon him and said fiercely: “—t!” They went on. Ratliff moved up to the gallery. While he was tying his team, Houston came out, followed by the big hound, and mounted and rode away. Ratliff mounted to the gallery where now at least twenty men were gathered, Bookwright among them.
Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion Page 18
